Turning around companies in crisis

By David Bailey

DETROIT (Reuters) - "The Turnaround Kid" was advertised by publisher HarperCollins as an inside account of the corporate turnarounds that author Steve Miller has been involved in as one of corporate America's "fix-it" men.

But in the end it became part elegy to his wife, Maggie, who died from brain cancer in 2006.

Miller said that the book, written in the aftermath of her death, would have had a different focus if it had been written today, at greater distance from that emotional event.

As it is, his freewheeling tale of corporate crises is laced with accounts of his discussions with his wife on how to handle them.

A one-time Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research) executive, Miller dived headlong into the turnaround of Chrysler under Lee Iacocca in 1979. In 2003, he worked out a restructuring and sale of Bethlehem Steel to a company led by Wilbur Ross. He describes himself at that time as an "itinerant fix-it man."

He has helped a dozen companies in various stages of distress since Chrysler, but the company with which he will be most closely identified is auto parts maker Delphi Corp, which he parachuted into in 2005.

In a chapter titled "Motown Maelstrom," he writes that he saw an opportunity at Delphi to start to "deal with some of the irrational labor practices that were slowly killing the Big Three" U.S. automakers.

But he now concedes he may have gone too far when he chose to highlight that Delphi's labor contract required top rates of $65 an hour even for someone mowing the lawns at a plant.